Brian Cox

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How does a vacuum flask know whether to keep things hot or cold? Always baffled me...
Are you thick or what, it knows coffee and soup should be hot dry ice should be cold and nobody gives a toss about tea because it should be freshly made and tastes like shit out of a vacuum flask.
 
Yeah, maybe.

On another topic, but a related and again I think interesting one, it's only a matter of time before mankind will not be the most intelligent thing on the planet. (There's plenty on the Brexit thread who fulfil that prediction already you might argue!)

But seriously in a few decades or maybe less, computers will be immeasurably more intelligent that we are, and all new scientific breakthroughs will be "imagined" by thinking computers. So maybe they will figure it all out, even if we can't!

just like the series humans, that's a particularly scary prospect for "homosapien"

space travel is the biggie for me(serious space travel), once we crack that, things really open up
 
just like the series humans, that's a particularly scary prospect for "homosapien"

space travel is the biggie for me(serious space travel), once we crack that, things really open up

Regards space travel - around our solar system is quite interesting. But the jump to interstellar space travel is ages away, and even if we crack it there's some fundamental issues which make it all very awkward.

There are 133 stars within 50 light years of us. That's not many to choose from if we are to hope to find an interesting planet to visit, one with a gravity similar to our own, and not so close to the star that we'd melt. One we could land on. Let's suppose the star (and planet) we want to visit is 50 light years away.

If we could accelerate a spaceship to 99.9% the speed of light, we could get there in "only" 2 years elapsed for the crew. Spend say a year on a planet there and return home. So a reasonably manageable 5 year mission for the crew. The problem is 101 years will have passed on earth by the time you get back, so everyone you knew are long dead, the technology you had when you left is antique. And more importantly the results you've got are possibly only mildly interesting since technology has moved on so much. It would also take 100 years for the crew to send back even the first bits of data they pick up on arrival.

There's also the fundamental challenge that this project - assuming we could develop the technology - might cost hundreds of billions, maybe a trillion dollars? With no return for 100 years. Who would fund such a wildly speculative investment with no prospect of any results in their lifetime?

I think we're talking a century or more away before such projects are even imaginable. Maybe even longer than that. Look how much space flight has "improved" over the past 60 years: It really hasn't developed much at all. We can't go much faster, the propulsion technology is identical. The computers are faster, but that's about it.
 

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